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Time for another weekly update. You may have noticed that the forums have been down for the last few days. This seems to have been caused by some sort of hiccup with our hosting provider that corrupted the disk on our server. Unfortunately it coincided with my being out of town traveling which significantly slowed our response. The good news is that other people appear to have experienced the same problem and we hope to have it sorted out soon.

The nearly complete NPC hauler - now with lights!

Flavien has taken a break from the networking code to focus a bit more on the game. Factories can now be spawned on the surface of a planet. He also significantly improved the quality of shadows cast within a cockpit. The rest of his time was spent working with our artists to improve their workflow for building ships.

The aft section of the nearly complete NPC hauler

On the art side the NPC hauler is pretty much finished. Kristian has moved onto creating the mockups for our UI and HUD. Jan is still working on the corvette cockpit, we hope to have some new pictures to show off soon, and Dan is doing the final geometry pass on various pieces of space station. We were hoping to release the next patch before I went out of town but we weren't quite able to get all of the testing completed. Now that I'm back, and once I finish getting the forums sorted out, we'll get back to releasing that patch. The flip side of the wait is that it should contain quite a bit of new content.

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Hey all time for another weekly update. For starters we released an update yesterday to our installation runtime for Developer Access+ backers. Unfortunately due to a bug in the previous version the upgrade doesn't always complete successfully. If you experience any problems we have a thread on the forums explaining how to resolve them. This update to the installation runtime is in preparation for our next game patch which should be ready soon!

Making progress on the corvette cockpit

We spent a lot of time last week getting the aforementioned patch for the game ready. It will contain a bunch of new content as well as some run-time improvements which we'll go over once it's released. This week I (Keith) will get back to finishing up the last bit of the pledge upgrade system followed by incremental patching while Flavien gets back to working on networking followed by weapons, finally, yay!

Another WIP shot of the corvette cockpit

Our goal is to have these last bits of low-level infrastructure work completed by sometime in November so that we can refocus all of our attention on gameplay and UX moving forward.

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It's that special time of the week again, weekly update time! This last week has been a particularly busy one as we released a new patch, pre-Alpha 0.1.6.0, yesterday to our Developer Access+ backers! This patch contains a whole bunch of new content including the completed hauler, new cockpits, and the prototype geometry for land bases and factories. If you're interested you can read the full patch notes on our forums.

Screen shot from the new patch of the interceptor cockpit and hauler

There's a good chance this may be the only patch we release this month as we finish up the last pieces of low level infrastructure such as networking, the pledge upgrade system, and incremental patching. On the art side work will continue on finishing up the corvette cockpit and exterior hulls for the small ships. We've also started mocking up our UI which we hope to start integrating into the game in November.

You probably didn't notice but we upgraded the buttons - they're now Super Sexy

Looking further out into the future the first big-ticket new gameplay system will be weapons followed by the resource system. Our primary goal is to get all major gameplay systems mocked up as soon as possible so we can release the Alpha. Once that occurs a process of implementing lesser systems and continual refinement will take us to the Beta. After the Beta ships we'll begin final polish and an optimization pass before going gold. We're just taking it one day at a time while keeping an eye on the prize - shipping Infinity: Battlescape to all of you!

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Sorry for the delay but here's a new weekly update. Per usual the last week has been quite busy. Flavien has made significant progress on the networking code, unfortunately there isn't anything to show, but it's starting to come together. Despite the progress being made there's still a good chunk of work left concerning client-side prediction and server-side latency compensation. Both are very important for smooth multiplayer gameplay but are equally tricky problems to solve. These improvements should be fairly noticeable once we release the next patch to Developer Access+ backers.

WIP shot of a space station

Unfortunately for me last week was one of those weeks where I had to take care of a lot of technical support, administrative stuff like accounting, and infrastructure issues. In mid September our forums went down for a few days due to one of our servers somehow getting magically corrupted. While everything is back up and running there are some lingering issues affecting new accounts that may prevent them from having proper access to the game and/or forums. These are being worked on and I hope to have everything back at 100% soon.

Another WIP station shot next to our ships

On the art side we're working on finishing up the corvette cockpit and we've started on the exteriors for the small ships. Kristian has also created some high level HUD mockups. These are focused on the broad look and feel. Composition of HUD items still needs a lot of iteration. The most difficult HUD item will likely be radar. Just like the visual style of Infinity: Battlescape we want our implementation of radar to be a blend of present day realism and futuristic sci-fi. Most of that will likely be determined by playtesting once we begin the Alpha.

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And another week bites the dust. Some of you may have noticed that our forums went down for a few hours earlier this week. That was due to the maintenance I spoke about during the last weekly update. I'm thrilled to report that the last of the forums issues caused by our outage in September have been resolved.

Updated WIP mockup of the HUD (not in-game)

Over the last few days we've spent a lot of time thinking about the HUD of which you can see the latest mockup above. Our guiding theme for the SFC faction is balancing 80's industrial sci-fi with advancements in technology you could expect way out in the future. To that end we want our HUD to be a blending of what you'd see in modern military aircraft and futuristic elements you would need to make newtonian spaceflight manageable.

You'll notice in the top left corner we have radar similar to what you'd find in many other space games. This is just a placeholder as radar is currently one of the least defined systems in the game. We expect it will morph heavily over time once we get into Alpha.

WIP mockup of the main menu (not in-game)

We've also done some mockups of the main menu system. You'll notice from the picture above there's nothing particularly glamorous about them. We've discussed the possibility of zooming around the solar system as you open different menus but that will likely depend on how much time we have during the polish phase (probably not much).

A couple of new station mockups

A couple of new patches have been released for the I-Novae launcher and the installation runtime over the last week. We're fixing problems and releasing patches as backers find them. Unfortunately this has come at the expense of finishing the pledge upgrade system however we're currently only aware of 2 remaining outstanding issues with the installation runtime so we'll be getting back to the pledge upgrade system shortly. A lot of backers have been asking us when it'll be ready and it's one of our top priorities.

Updated shot of the corvette cockpit

To summarize we're currently finishing up the networking improvements and pledge upgrade system. Once those are complete we'll be moving onto implementing weapons, our new menu/HUD system, and incremental patching.

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Another week another update. We released a patch for the installation runtime this week that fixed the last remaining issues we're currently aware of. The corvette cockpit has been completed, the final geometry pass for large station pieces is nearly complete, and work is progressing on final geometry for both the corvette and interceptor exteriors.

Blue atmosphere from orbit

On the engineering side we continue to make good progress on the network interpolation. Hopefully it'll be wrapped up within a couple of weeks so work can begin on small ship weapons. We also started laying some of the low level groundwork for our new UI system that will be used to build our HUD and menu system. If you haven't seen the mockups yet checkout last weeks update.

The view from the thin atmosphere around a tall mountain

Next month will be a little extra hectic because somehow everyone in the company has a lease that's expiring and we're all moving into cheaper apartments - except Kristian because his lease expired last month lol. Back in weekly update #30 we announced that the Alpha release would be delayed until early 2017. We're currently planning on offering a free weekend to play the game for all Alpha backers to make up for it. The exact date hasn't been nailed down yet, probably after we're finished with the networking fixes, but we'll let everyone know soon. That's about it for this week!

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Hey everyone time for an update. This last week has been fairly hectic for all of us. As was mentioned last week most of the team is trying to find new living arrangements within their respective cities because our leases all coincidentally expire at roughly the same time. This has affected our work schedule a bit since finding a new apartment is quite time consuming.

WIP final geometry pass for the interceptor

Flavien has taken a brief break from the networking code to implement the foundation for what we hope will someday be support for mods. We've implemented a simple racing mod which we intend to maintain throughout development of the game so that the interface between mods and the game will be preserved. I've been working on some low level rendering improvements that will lay the foundation for the new UI system we want to build to power our HUD and menu system.

Another WIP shot of the interceptor final geometry pass

On the art side work continues on the final geometry passes for the corvette exterior, interceptor exterior, and large station pieces. Aside from the new screen shots in this update there's not much else to say about that at the moment. I've put in an application on a new (cheaper) apartment so I should have a lot less distraction this week which will allow me to refocus on finishing the pledge upgrade system. Unfortunately the other guys are still looking but we hope they'll find something agreeable soon.

One last WIP shot of the final interceptor geometry pass

Given that we'll all have to pack, move into, and then unpack in our new apartments by the end of November - combined with the upcoming holidays - it's possible that our Alpha launch early next year might be a bit on the rougher side. It's still too early to know for certain but in the end we figure that Alpha backers just want to have something to play sooner rather than later. Lastly we're planning on having our free weekend for Alpha backers to try the game sometime after the pledge upgrade system is completed. Some Beta backers have expressed their desire to upgrade so they can be a part of that free weekend and we want to make that available for them. That's it for this week!

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Hey everyone it's weekly update time. Unfortunately there's no new screenshots this week because our artists forgot to upload them, they're all asleep right now, and I don't feel like waiting until tomorrow because I'll be distracted by the US election. Despite that good progress continues to be made by the art team. The large detail final geometry pass for stations is nearly complete which will be exciting to get integrated into the game. There's still quite a bit of work left on the small detail geometry, particularly within hangar bays, but the bulk of the station pieces are geometrically completed.

The interceptor and corvette exteriors are also really coming together great and we'll hopefully have some new screen shots to show off for the next update. Flavien, to his great dismay, was incapacitated most of the week due to illness so not much progress to report with the networking. The remaining piece of the pledge upgrade system, handling chargebacks, is nearly complete with (currently) only 1 outstanding issue remaining. There's still a bunch of testing still to be conducted and then some legal work to do for a Terms of Service but we're hoping to release it and put it behind us soon - especially because working on it is killing my soul.

While we had initially announced support for both credit cards and PayPal with the new pledge upgrade system it will only support credit cards and bitcoin at release. This is because PayPal's integration is a bit of a nightmare and... it's killing my soul. I'll finish it at some point in the future after I have time to replenish my intestinal fortitude - unless a lot of people yell at me because they want to upgrade via PayPal. Funny how that works. Anyway that's it for this week, sorry about the missing screen shots, we'll get you all some new content during the next update for sure!

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Hey everybody here's your Infinity: Battlescape weekly update! I'm thrilled to report that the coding effort for pledge upgrades via credit cards and bitcoin is now complete! I still have to work with our lawyer to get a Terms of Service written before I can release it but hopefully that'll be sometime this week. While waiting for the legal review I'll be shifting over to some low level engine improvements which lay the groundwork for our new UI system for the game.

WIP geometry for interceptor/bomber hangar

Flavien continues his work on networking. Unfortunately when it comes to planets nothing is easy and it's taking a bit longer than anticipated due to some hiccups with server side hit detection on planet surfaces. Most notably the server needs to generate terrain collision meshes on-demand for every player and particle in the game that happens to be near the ground which, worst case, can be quite a lot over an incredible surface area. This poses some unique technical challenges.

WIP final geometry pass for the corvette

On the art side we're finishing up the large scale final geometry pass for space stations. Once that's complete we'll begin the final geometry pass for factories. Jan and Kristian are still working on the final geometry passes for the corvette and interceptor exteriors. Those are really coming together nicely and they're going to look great once the texturing pass is complete. Lastly if you have an opinion on whether or not our interceptor should have a horizontal bar in the cockpit - please head over to our forums and vote.

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Hey everybody time for another weekly update. This week I'm going to start with the art update because I'm going to spend a lot of time discussing some of the engineering stuff we're doing. The art team is beginning to wrap up the final geometry pass for the interceptor, bomber, corvette, and large station pieces. This week's screen shots show off the latest progress for the bomber and corvette respectively.

Final geometry for the bomber exterior is almost finished

Unfortunately we haven't been able to release our new pledge upgrade system yet because the legal review of the new Terms of Service isn't done. This week is a major holiday here in the U.S. which is likely slowing things down for our attorney but the review will hopefully be completed soon. We'll make an announcement once the pledge upgrade system is available.

Some sexy bomber butt

For those of you who've been with us for a while you may recall that Flavien originally started building our technology around 2004/2005. That's a long time ago and it was just before dual core CPU's became a thing. What this means is that our game engine was originally designed around being single-threaded. Over the intervening years between then and now we've optimized specific portions of the engine for modern multi-core CPU's however this was done with the knowledge that at some point we'd have to bite the bullet and upgrade the rest of it. With our goal of supporting 200 players in massive space battles that bill has now come due.

The final geometry for the corvette exterior is also nearly complete

To that end we actually began this process over the summer when we upgraded our physics engine to be multi-threaded. Unfortunately that still leaves entity/actor/scene updates and rendering. Coincidentally both of these are being upgraded at the same time, right now, because of dependencies in the networking code that Flavien is writing and the new UI system that I've started writing.

Top shot of the corvette

Flavien is nearly finished with his new entity/actor/scene code and will soon be getting back to the remainder of the networking improvements. This includes client-side prediction (hides latency) and a challenging problem with server-side collision detection against planet terrain that recently popped up. I'm writing our new UI system using an experimental implementation of the new Vulkan graphics API which is designed around multi-threading. Once the UI system gets far enough along that I'm confident in its new rendering abstractions I'll replace Vulkan with D3D11 to finish it.

The corvette underside

This means for the Alpha the game will have 2 rendering systems. The bad old single-threaded renderer which will draw most of the game and the brand new multi-threaded renderer that will draw the UI. Only D3D11 will be supported at launch so the experimental Vulkan implementation will just hang out until we have time to finish it once the game ships to retail. After the Alpha gets released we'll begin iteratively moving the rest of the game over to the new rendering system so we can make maximum use of all of your CPU cores. We expect that by the time that all of this is done we'll have about 1 - 1.5 months left to implement the majority of the gameplay for the Alpha. Needless to say the release of the Alpha is going to come in hard and fast, it probably won't be pretty, but if you've been following these updates with any regularity that shouldn't come as a surprise.

That's it for this week and for those of you in the U.S. enjoy your Thanksgiving!

Hey All, this is Flavien. Keith ran into trouble with his computer yesterday ( it's having difficulties booting up apparently ) so I'll be in charge of this weekly update.

Keith has been making good progress on the new Vulkan renderer and abstractions. He can almost render a.. triangle. No kidding. Interestingly, to be able to render just a single triangle in Vulkan requires pretty much all systems to be functional, so although it might not look like it, it's a huge step forward ! We still have to experiment with shaders though.

If you remember the thread about Vulkan versus DirectX12 on our forums a few months ago, we had expressed some doubts about the built-in Vulkan shader compiler, as it doesn't seem to perform any advanced shader code optmization. Now that the fundation is there, we will soon be able to figure that out and determine whether shader performance is acceptable or not. If it's not, we can still 1) wait for the compiler to mature ( which hopefully should happen by the time the game is released ) or 2) later on, switch to DirectX 12 while maintening a fall back on to DirectX 11 for Windows 7+.

FInterceptor landed on planet ( render )

On my side, I'm working on our new entity-component system ( ECS ) and refactoring the client / server ( including networking improvements ). It's taking a while, but that was expected. ECS will allow us to utilize more agressive multithreading including for gameplay logic ( in the current build, gameplay logic is single threaded with a couple of independent systems such as sounds, networking or physics running in separate threads ).

The client / server refactoring is also a very important step because it allows us to introduce some major concepts for the future game, such as a form of database persistency ( if the server crashes, we don't want players to lose their progression and the state of the match / battles that were running ) or a replay feature ( still experimental, so I can't promise it for the final game, but that's definitely something we want to do ), and even the basics of modding ( through C/C++/C# custom DLLs ). So as you can imagine, this new version is a major milestone in the project, and will also introduce a bunch of new gameplay concepts ( such as team-based gameplay/spawning, credits, etc.. ).

There's currently no ETA for that new version, but I can safely say it won't happen until next year. Meanwhile, we're still going to release a bunch of content patchs for the current build with art assets improvements or experiments ( like for the interceptor cockpit's bar, which according to a poll on our forums, most people would like to see removed.. ).

Corvette final geometry pass ( render )

On the art side, I'm happy to report that the geometry phase for all 3 "small" ships ( interceptor, bomber and corvette ) is coming to an end. It's still not 100% finished but it's getting close to. Kristian is finishing up the bomber, but still has to rework the landing gears which we found a bit frail for such a bulky ship, and adding some minute details. Jan's detailed the corvette and added various details on the plating and thrusters. Since we haven't posted a real-time preview model yet, it's a good occasion to let you review the Sketchfab model here:

Dan has moved on to working on.. space station windows. They're very important because they're the #1 best way to give a sense of scale to things in space. So we're trying to make the windows as varied as possible to avoid patterns, and include some additional man-scale details here & there, like docking doors. We're planning on making the windows layout unique per station, so even if two stations are reusing the same modules, they'll still look slightly different with their windows on.

Also note that next week, Keith is relocating to a new place and might or might not have Internet access, so I might be in charge of the next weekly update too :slight_smile: See you next week,

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Hey everyone time for another update. This week was a bit slower on the engineering side because I was busy moving into a new apartment. I've made some additional progress on the rendering abstraction for the new UI system but not much else of note. Fortunately Flavien was able to finish his new entity/component system with multi-threaded updates and will be resuming work on the remaining pieces of networking code.

Latest WIP of the Bomber exterior geometry

On the art side things continue to move along at a good pace. Dan is wrapping up work on station windows, which contribute greatly to a proper sense of scale, and will soon be starting on final factory geometry. Jan has been putting quite a bit of time into generating and optimizing our Level of Detail (LOD) meshes. These are meshes with lower polycounts that get rendered in place of the fully detailed mesh depending on how far away it is. He's also wrapping up the final corvette geometry which we should have some new screen shots of soon. Lastly Kristian is in the polish phase with the final bomber geometry which is coming along great as you can see above.

Examples of the different LOD meshes for the NPC hauler

Our attorney got us the revised version of our crowdfunding terms of service today. There's still some additional review work to be done but we're trying to get that sorted out as soon as possible so we can release the new pledge upgrade system. Jan has started integrating all of the updated art assets into the game as we begin preparing for our next patch. This patch will primarily be a content update and probably our last of 2016. Most of the team will be out of town traveling at the end of the month for the holiday so we're working diligently to get the patch and the pledge upgrade system released by then.